(Herat) At least five people were killed, including a child, and 20 others injured Friday in two successive bomb attacks in Herat, western Afghanistan, according to local authorities.
Posted at 2:22 p.m.
The attacks took place in the evening, when a group of young men and children had gathered to play in a field where the bombs had been planted.
“Five people were killed and 20 others were injured,” Sabit Harwi, spokesman for Herat’s intelligence office, told AFP, adding that local police defused two other bombs found in the area.
The whole area had been cleared recently, Harwi said, adding that the bombs that exploded on Friday appeared to have been planted just before the group’s arrival.
A child died in the attack, said the director of the ambulance services of Herat, Ibrahim Mohammadi.
Close to Iran, Herat is Afghanistan’s third largest city. The situation there has been relatively calm in recent weeks.
In January, a bomb attack targeting a minibus killed seven people in an area mostly inhabited by the city’s Shia minority.
In another attack earlier on Friday, five children were killed in the accidental explosion of a mortar shell in southwestern Helmand province, local official Mohammad Qasim Riaz told AFP. of the Department of Information and Culture.
Security in the country has improved greatly since the Taliban took power in August and the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, after 20 years of attrition against their military presence.
However, several attacks, some of which claimed by the EI-K, the local branch of the Islamic State organization, still occur.